Wednesday, 19 September 2012

Peter Hoare as Michel in Julietta at the Coliseum
(Photo: Richard Hubert Smith)

As the reviews came trickling in yesterday of Monday night’s Julietta at ENO, I have to admit to
wondering if I had just been in the wrong mood, or just hadn’t got where the
greatness of Martinů’s ‘rarely performed masterpiece’ lay. Indeed, was I just
being too cynical in detecting a certain irreconcilable contradiction at the
heart of such marketing rubric? Isn’t it often the case that many of these ‘masterpieces’ rely on their very status as ‘rarely performed’, giving their
champions the convenient riposte: ‘well, you can never really judge it unless
you see it in a decent staging’.

Well, Julietta has
now definitely received that at ENO, with Richard Jones turning in a typically stylish
production—although was I alone in wondering whether, beyond its striking,
stretched and manipulated giant accordion, there wasn’t room for more in the
way of dreamy imagination? The fine cast did an excellent job, the orchestra,
too. And, while I should declare that Monday night was the first time I heard the
score, it seemed as though Ed Gardner made a persuasive case for it: its
splashes of glittering colour came across well, as did the lyrical
outbursts, some of which came close to sweeping me along.

From left to right: Emelie Renard, Clare Presland
and Samantha Price as the Gentlemen
and Peter Hoare as Michel (Photo: Richard Hubert Smith)

But the work, based on a surreal play by Georges Neveux,
left me entirely cold. It is neither terribly funny, nor, to our (or my, at least) jaded
21st-century imaginations, terribly interesting. An exploration of a community
floating around in a state of collective amnesia has possibilities for highlighting humour
or a sort of nightmarish, recurring futility, neither of which were explored. Meanwhile,
the work’s leaden pace—lingering on matters with which, by definition, it is
difficult for the audience to engage in any meaningful way—made the 50 minutes
of Act 2, in particular, seem extremely long.

It measures pretty low
on the surrealism scale, in any case, and suffers by not employing the sort of snappy pace—a playful, light engagement with time that deals in seconds
rather than minutes—that would seem to be part and parcel of the aesthetic, where one flitting absurdity dissolves into the next before the brain has a chance to pin it down and destroy it with logic. A
work that came to mind was Shostakovich’s The
Nose—hardly a masterpiece, but a piece whose increasingly ridiculous scenes
are rattled through at such a pace that they never overstay their welcome. And,
of course, we can only have a fragmentary, patchy idea of the actual romance
between Julietta and Michel, a travelling salesman who arrives in the strange amnesiac town with the
advantage of a memory—an advantage that he, too, finally loses.

That’s clearly one of the work’s main points, but whether or
not it inspires deep contemplation or an eye-rolling sense of ‘so what?’ seems more
down to the individual than is often the case, as reviews ranging from five,
through four, to three stars would seem to make clear; from raves to what might
best be called non-raves. Martinů’s score, for its part, has some fine moments, and is put together with considerable skill; but it seemed to wheel out influences with too little input from the composer himself, and, for a work first performed in 1938, seemed distinctly behind the curve—a sense only emphasized by the fact that the production was being supported by
‘ENO’s Contemporary [!] Opera Group’. Still, there are plenty of opportunities for those who haven
’t seen it yet to make up their own minds.

Saturday, 15 September 2012

First, apologies for a long absence. Here are a few links to
my reviews of Proms, which went some way to keeping me busy over the summer
(John Eliot Gardiner’s Pélleashere;
Handel from the OAE and Concert Spirituel here, the São Paulo Symphony
Orchestra here, and the Vienna Philharmonic’s two concerts here and here),
along with my review of Opera Holland Park’s Falstaff and Onegin, here.

Elena Xanthoudakis (Pamina) and Kathryn Lewek (Queen of the Night)
in ENO's revival of The Magic Flute (Photo: Alastair Muir)

Meanwhile, in the last week I’ve been returning from
Last-Night-of-the-Proms and End-of-the-Golden-Summer euphoria to something
approaching normalcy: back to business as usual with ENO’s final (and
apparently this time it really is
final) revival of Nicholas Hytner’s Magic
Flute on Thursday, before catching Opera North’s Carousel at the Barbican Theatre before it spins its not-so-merry
way out of London after an extended season. I’ll keep my comments on The Magic Flute to a minimum, since I’m
reviewing it for next month’s opera:
it’s a solid enough revival, with some outstanding singing (Kathryn Lewek’s
Queen of the Night was particularly impressive), but one that didn’t quite add
up to the sum of its parts on the first night of its 10-performance run—it surely
will begin to do so as run progresses.

Inevitably, on the eve of its final weekend after a
five-week run, Carousel was going to
be a smoother affair; and, of course, Rogers and Hammerstein had a fair bit
more practice at weaving together numbers and dialogue, within the bounds of much more clearly defined music-theatre tradition, than Mozart and
Schikaneder did. Nevertheless, it was striking how awkward and stilted the delivery of the dialogue in Magic Flute seemed in comparison. And this Carousel is a brilliantly fluent show, smartly directed Jo Davies, ingeniously designed by
Anthony Ward and choreographed with humour and imagination by Kay Shephard. The
cast—led by Michael Todd Simpson’s hunky, broody Billy, Katherine Manley’s sweetly-sung
and even-sweeter-natured Julie, and Sarah Tynan’s bright, zingy Carrie—was
uniformly excellent; accents were uniformly convincing, too, in a way they
certainly hadn’t been at the Coliseum the previous evening.

Opera North's Carousel (Photo: Alastair Muir)

In his Guardian review,
Michael Billington referred to the Carousel’s
‘dodgy brilliance’, and, coming to it totally unprepared, I was struck not only
by the quality of the music, but also what can only really be called the show’s
philosophical ambition, with its flawed (anti-)hero Billy Bigelow dying and
going to the afterlife before being given a chance to see his now-teenage
daughter. This confrontation with her, however, highlights the work’s ‘dodgier’
side. He ends up hitting her, but, as she talks it over with her mother Julie,
they agree that it’s one of those blows that feels a bit more like a kiss: a
good thwack from someone who loves you is really, er, a tender expression of
affection. It’s a deeply sinister message, and one that no number of reprises
of ‘You’ll never walk alone’ can hope to dignify.

And, with Wednesday’s revelations regarding the betrayal of Hillsborough
families, that song brought its independent power and associations with it more strongly than ever. I began to feel—against all my completist instincts and
contextualising desires—that maybe it was better employed on Wednesday in front of Liverpool's St. George’s Hall than it was here.

Nevertheless, this show demonstrated once more what interesting work is being done at Opera North, and Davies is to
be commended for presenting Carousel with wharts-and-all candour: there’s enough sweetness in the score already to start sugar-coating its more troubling elements.

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About Me

I am freelance critic, writer and musicologist based in Berlin. I have held editorial posts at Gramophone and Opera, was opera critic of the Spectator and have worked as a critic for the Daily Telegraph and Financial Times. I was editor of 30-Second Opera (Ivy Press, 2015), now also available – when I checked last – in French, German and Spanish. My PhD (awarded from King's College London in early 2011) was a critical reassessment of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's 'Die Frau ohne Schatten'; further details of my academic work can be found under 'Publications and Papers'.
If you'd like to email me, I can be reached on hugojeshirley[at]gmail.com.

About this Blog

Fatal Conclusions is designed to serve as a modest outlet for various reviews (of varying levels of formality and punctuality) and ideas regarding what's going on in the Opera and Classical Music worlds--and, if I'm feeling adventurous, beyond. Thanks for popping by. I hope you enjoy reading and please feel free to leave comments.